divine insects

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I feel like I’m treading thick water in a
Wasteland. It’s harder to feel joy that isn’t synthetically triggered, that isn’t prompted by novelty or by fleeing
More and more, I want to grip something outside of myself to be sure I’m still here
I feel like light refracting in water
I no longer feel the panic of containing myself, instead I feel like I’m smoke or the dissolving of an apparition once you decide it’s no longer real —
Or the second skin a dream weaves around you that slowly sheds once you wake up, but not quite all the way.
The husk of a world we are in and accelerating towards is much worse than anyone seems to be acknowledging.
Americans seem to believe, as always, that they’ll be fine and that’s the extent of care they extend —
I don’t know that grabbing peoples faces and shoving it into reality for an acknowledgment would do anything at all.
It may just be a selfish impulse because I’m depleted and full of rage and alienated,
or maybe I’m tired and tired of feeling alone in it
Speaking with S, he concluded in agreement  that it’s exhausting to get people even to square one, for the work to actually do from there is monumental
I was listening to a talk on AI psychosis which was mainly about how AI has either driven people into psychosis or is featured in bouts/episodes of psychosis and the overall function of these chatbots in people’s lives who use them.
I was having trouble grappling with a fundamental point that everything else was premised on: why does anyone use this? What is the appeal?
I understand the main reasons:
using it as a quick tool for work, answering math questions, and as E put it: a perceived shortcut to gathering info
But at a core level, I cannot identify the impulse people have that would inspire them to engage with it to such an extent that would drive them into a psychotic state.
I am intuitively repelled by many technofascist “tools” and have remained largely insulated from their use. I’ve never used ChatGPT in my life and I don’t understand how the reference points of reality can disappear to such a degree where one becomes consumed or psychotic:
I don’t understand how people aren’t cognizant that these “conversations” are taking place in a vacuum in which the machine is reliant on context logs that shift and disappear.
It’s entirely an un-human process.
It is not a conversation.
If everything is social, which I believe to be the case,
what is firing through us when we work out an answer, together, through conversation? memories and literary references, something we saw last week, something we experienced 10 years ago that is alchemized instantaneously, triggered by virtue of being in conversation with one another 
I love talking, I talk to anyone about anything, I learn more through talking than I do any other way —
It is an electric and energizing experiment. what is exhiliarating about real conversation is that these intangible human processes are totally private and we put them forth, together, and learn exactly in that moment what is and could be 
While I understand the other main reason that people use AI to simulate conversation is due to being alone, feeling lonely, or alienated,
my personal instinct in those respects has always been to either self destruct or throw myself into pursuing knowledge, following curiosity, learning things.
I still can’t really understand how a desire forms which seems completely counterintuitive to the social nature of humans at a base level.
It’s fake. It’s not real.
Even AI generated text sounds off — the words aren’t used in a way anyone would put them together. The syntax is clunky. It is an awkward attempt at putting a human thought to words. It ends up making me feel like I’m having a stroke trying to parse it until I realize it’s not me, it’s that this isn’t a real thought anyone wrote 
I started thinking more deeply about why or how it seems many people aren’t naturally, instinctively repelled by synthetic consciousness —
I suppose we were on some level;
that’s why the uncanny valley exists in a way,
we instinctively recoiled from what appears to be human but very much isn’t.
So what exactly has shifted?
In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici outlines, among other things, the transition of the body through the fall of feudalism and the institution of capitalism:
To pose the body as mechanical matter, void of any intrinsic teleology — the "occult
virtues" attributed to it by both Natural Magic and the popular superstitions of the time — was to make intelligible the possibility of subordinating it to a work process that increasingly relied on uniform and predictable forms of behavior.
Once its devices were deconstructed and it was itself reduced to a tool, the body could be opened to an infinite manipulation of its powers and possibilities. One could investigate the vices and limits of imagination, the virtues of habit, the uses of fear, how certain passions can be avoided or neutralized, and how they can be more rationally utilized. In this sense, Mechanical Philosophy contributed to increasing the ruling-class control over the natural world, control over human nature being the first, most indispensable step.
We’re in some kind of newer iteration of this particular phenomenon.
human body-as-machine-divorced-from-soul seeking disembodied-machine mind-imbued-with-simulated soul 
A human is not without its intrinsic spirit, intangibles, the interiorities and aspects that are indefinable or unable to be observed but are known —
So why would anyone have a desire to engage with a simulated version of this?
And how has this particular desire-impulse process already occurred on some mass level?
I’m aware many people have not kept their spirits intact —
This is something I’ve written about, something I’ve identified years ago as the only possible answer to certain social phenomena and maybe this is just a newer and more frightening, accelerated version of it.
But I suppose what I’m interested in is to define the intangibles of impulse —
I want to identify what is being fulfilled through a completely synthetic experience. The comfort of being cocooned in ineloquent sycophancy? The anti-human, anti-social desire to have every banal feeling reinforced by a machine?
Why not call someone on the phone and have a conversation? Talk to a stranger? Figure it out together. I was asked out on the train a few months ago and he made the observation that everyone was on their phones individually. Totally absorbed, not even looking out of a window.
I was reading Calvino and he was watching me, which is maybe what made that interaction at all possible, who knows, but we ended up being the only people in a conversation as a result.
This is all to say that there’s enough knowledge between each other to answer most questions.
There’s enough friction between us to create and keep interest, there’s enough to challenge each other and be wrong, create hurt, to spark love and anger and everything unpleasant and beautiful
What is exquisite about human connection is what is ugly and fucked up.
I don’t love you in spite of your flaws, I love you precisely because of them 
What is divine between us is that there is a deep well of error.
We cannot be god.
Why would you want to be?